The Verge got to interview Valve's CEO, Gabe Newell, and the priceless quotes are just flying left and right. "We'll come out with our own and we'll sell it to consumers by ourselves. That'll be a Linux box, [and] if you want to install Windows you can. We're not going to make it hard. This is not some locked box by any stretch of the imagination." Others will be making Steambox devices too. Also: "Windows 8 was like this giant sadness. It just hurts everybody in the PC business. [...] When I started using it I was like 'oh my god...' I find [Windows 8] unusable." This last point is something I agree with vehemently. Can't comment on Windows 8 on tablets, but on regular PCs it's a schizophrenic, unusable clusterduck. It got me to switch back to Mac and use KDE (on my laptop). Let that sink in for a while.

I'm suitably impressed by what Valve are doing here. I said in a previous article's comments about my scepticism of Valve's words about openness, of course words are nothing until the product ships but what they're doing here is definitely /different/

* Cost? This certainly looks high-end. If it's $1000 from one vendor, how much is it from Valve? This is a major purchase, and how much of the market is really affluent enough to drop a G on a gaming PC running Linux?

The OEM PC market right now is a disaster. I'm hoping that Valve's approach is right enough to revive things a bit. I would like nothing more than to see the decades old HP / Packard Bell / Acer / ... PC line up change into something actually new.